VoltDB, an in-memory database designed by well known database researchers like Michael Stonebraker, last week announced the release of their new version with features focussed at performance, durability and easy out of the box experience. One of the reasons VoltDB came into my radar was due to their open source roots. In the age of jargons, VoltDB falls under NewSQL category of databases. In this age go high volume data, a database like VoltDB is absolutely critical and with the new release, they are making the database more developer friendly.

What is VoltDB and why it is interesting?

VoltDB is an in-memory database for large datasets while still being ACID compliant. It is a database designed for high throughput large data situations while still supporting SQL queries and Java stored procedures. It uses shared nothing scale-out architecture. With built in fault tolerance and durability (from Version 2.0) and ability to handle high velocity data, VoltDB is positioning itself to be the right database wherever “data hose” comes into picture in modern applications. VoltDB can play well with both Hadoop and OLAP data warehouse architectures.

Some of the areas where VoltDB might fit in well include:

Digital marketing

Gaming transactions

Website Analytics

Financial industry

Location based services

etc.

VoltDB Version 2.0 Features:

Version 2.0 is aimed at increasing developer productivity, better performance, durability, out of the box experience,etc.. Some of the newly minted features include:

Command logging for durability. This feature will help in quick (and even 100% recovery) in case of a failure

Streaming export overflow: Sometimes while exporting the data, the target machine may not match the speed of VoltDB and this feature creates an overflow queue which will ensure that all the data reaches the downstream datastore without any loss. This feature will help mitigate impedance mismatch and help provide bidirectional durability

Distributed query optimizations for better performance

One of the interesting new feature is JDBC support which will be useful in integrating with RDBMS ecosystem tools

VoltDB Studio, a browser based tools for developers. This is a pretty cool feature and will greatly enhance developer productivity

VoltDB jumpstart kits for AWS EC2 and VMware infrastructures. This is meant to give out of the box seamless experience to users

VoltDB is interesting in the crowded and competitive new age database space. With singular focus on high throughput applications, they are trying to create a niche market for them. It will be interesting to see how they fare in the coming years.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.